While\nthis was an absolutely fascinating lecture on Tibetan Buddhism and iconoclasm,\nthere wasn’t much in it that I would truly consider “crazy” even\nthough one of the Awakened Buddhists himself (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche) coined\nthe phrase “crazy wisdom” in the West. Much of the “crazy”\nparts simply sounded to me like a cultural disconnect between East and West. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps\nit’s because I’m pretty liberal and into philosophy, and had to read a lot of\nNietzsche in the past, but a lot of the ideas behind Buddhism in the lecture\ngiven made sense to me, and didn’t seem crazy at all (e.g. that the “self\ndoesn’t exist the way it appears” \u2013 that nothing really exists simply as\nit appears on the surface, and that everything, even negative\/harmful emotions\ncan be harnessed for the benefit of others and transmuted into a positive\/constructive\nforce if done correctly and one has the knowledge and skill to do such a thing.\nAnger for the sake of anger doesn’t get anything done, and only leads to more\nanger, for example). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\nwere one or two individuals that were eyebrow raising in their level of inappropriate\nbehavior and general “craziness” (probably because of near perpetual\nintoxication, since most “), but for most<\/em>\nof the lecture I felt that the “Crazy Wisdom” aspect of the lecture\nwas more of a cultural disconnect than anything else. To Westerners, a lot of\nEast\/Southeast Asian cultural norms seem “crazy” and “weird”\nbut mostly because their cultural norms aren’t Western cultural norms and most everyday\npeople’s kneejerk reaction is to go “That’s so crazy\/weird” when\nencountering something from another culture that’s different than our own. If\nyou were to take a step back and think about it, consider it from another person’s\nperspective\/culture, then perhaps you wouldn’t think it so crazy at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Outside\nof only a handful of individual practitioners\/leaders, who seemed to be\noutliers and eccentrics, they seemed very not-crazy at all. Normal by their own\nculture’s standards. Trying to normalize them Western standards would be ignorant\nat best and racist at worst \u2013 eccentric outliers not considered. \n\nHirshberg’s\nlecture was fascinating and enlightening \u2013 and I don’t think I could consider practitioners\nof the iconoclastic Tibetan Buddhism as crazy. It’s simply a different\nreligious culture than I’m used to seeing, and while I’m ignorant on a great\nmany things, I’m not ignorant enough to write them off as certifiably insane. \n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While this was an absolutely fascinating lecture on Tibetan Buddhism and iconoclasm, there wasn’t much in it that I would truly consider “crazy” even though one of the Awakened Buddhists himself (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche) coined the phrase “crazy wisdom” in the West. Much of the “crazy” parts simply sounded to me like a cultural disconnect … Continue reading “Smith’s Response to Hirshberg’s “Crazy Wisdom? Enlightened Iconoclasm in Tibet, Guru Sex Scandals in the West””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[48,33],"class_list":["post-1252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cpr-series-mad-lectures","tag-section-02"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/papJgd-kc","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1253,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions\/1253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}